The March

About this Book

They are coming, Mattie, they are marching. It is an army of
wild dogs led by this apostate, this hideous wretch, this
devil who will drink your tea and bow before he takes
everything from you.

And now, her message delivered, her aunt slumped back in her
seat, and gave her order to be off. Where Letitia Pettibone
was going Mattie could not get the answer. Nor how much time
there was, in fact, before the scourge arrived at her own
door. Not that she doubted the woman. She looked into the sky
slowly lightening to its gray beginnings of the day. She heard
nothing but the cock crowing and, as she turned, suddenly
angry, the whisperings of the slaves gathered now at the
corner of the house. And then with the team away, the carriage
rolling down the gravel path, Mattie turned, lifting the hem
of her robe, and mounted the steps only to see that horrible
child Pearl, insolent as ever, standing, arms folded, against
the pillar as if the plantation was her own.

John Jameson was not unprepared. As far back as September,
when the news had come that Hood had pulled out and the Union
armies had Atlanta, he sat Mattie down and told her what had
to be done. The rugs were rolled, the art was taken down from
the walls, her needlepoint chairswhatever she valued, he told
herher English fabrics, the china, even her family Bible: it
was all to be packed up and carted to Milledgeville and thence
put on the train to Savannah, where John's cotton broker had
agreed to store their things in his warehouse. Not my piano,
she'd said, that will stay. It would rot in the dampness of
that place. As you wish, John had said, having no feeling for
music in any case.

Mattie was dismayed to see her home so depleted. Through the
bare windows the sun shone, lighting up the floors as if her
life were going backward and she was again a young bride in a
new-built unfurnished manse and with a somewhat frightening
husband twice her age. She wondered how John knew the war
would touch them directly. In fact he didn't, but he was a man
whose success gave him reason to suppose he was smarter than
most people. He had a presence, with his voluminous chest and
large head of wild white hair. Don't argue with me, Mattie.
They lost twenty or thirty thousand men taking that city.
There's hell to pay. You're a general, with a President who's
a madman. Would you just sit there? So where? To Augusta? To
Macon? And how will he ride, if not through these hills? And
don't expect that poor excuse for a Rebel army to do anything
about it. But if I'm wrong, and I pray God I am, what will I
have lost, tell me?

Mattie was not allowed to disagree in such matters. She felt
even more dismayed and said not a thing when, with the crops
in, John arranged to sell away his dozen prime field hands.
They were bound, all of them, to a dealer in Columbia, South
Carolina. When the day came and they were put in shackles into
the wagon, she had to run upstairs and cover her ears so as
not to hear the families wailing down in the shacks. All John
had said was No buck nigger of mine will wear a Federal
uniform, I'll promise you that.

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